I think the point is actually general enough to include every industry: VCs give you enough money to pay people to do R&D / product design until you've got a go

I think the point is actually general enough to include every industry: VCs give you enough money to pay people to do R&D / product design until you've got a good enough product that your profits pay for the R&D / product design. In some product industries, this happens by switching to creating a new product (so 3M, GE, etc), and in some this is an endless stream of updates to the existing product (Google, Apple, Intel, etc). This process can be short circuited by an acquisition, but of course the acquisition is ultimately paid for by past customer profits too. In the context of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10251676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10251676 's assertion that "Drug creation needs to be nationalized, 100% tax funded all the way from researcher to trials to manufacture, and the drugs sold at cost thereafter" which was followed by brixton's reply that "The drugs might end up being cheaper, but there will be much less research for drugs" this remains a very important point: drug R&D folk aren't in it for the VC funding... they're in it for the profit margin. If you remove that light at the end of the tunnel, there are no startups, and the smartest of us go work for the Googles of this world. (Though FWIW I do think you, refurb, and I are all roughly on the same page if we limit our scope to startups.)